On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [18]
On May 17 Kerouac told Ginsberg that he had sent the manuscript to Carl Solomon and that he expected it to arrive by May 23. On May 18 Kerouac gave Ginsberg a high-spirited explanation of the “sketching” technique he had used to change “the conventional narrative survey” of On the Road to the “big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds” of Cody:
Now here is what sketching is. In the first place you remember last September when Carl first ordered the Neal book and wanted it…Sketching came to me in full force on October 25th…-so strongly it didn’t matter about Carl’s offer and I began sketching everything in sight, so that On the Road took its turn from conventional narrative survey of road trips etc. into a big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds. Sketching (Ed White casually mentioned it in 124 the Chinese restaurant near Columbia, “Why don’t you just sketch in the street like a painter but with words”) which I did…everything activates in front of you in myriad confusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social etc. and slap it all down shameless, willynilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing. Traditional source: Yeats’ trance writing, of course. It’s the only way to write.
The novel, Kerouac told Ginsberg, was “all good”:
We can show Road to Scribners or Simpson or Farrar Straus [Stanley Young] if necessary, change title to Visions of Neal or somethin, and I write new Road for Wynn.
What Ginsberg then read and what Kerouac had sent Carl Solomon at Wyn was indeed the manuscript of Visions of Cody and not On the Road. Kerouac’s attempts to prepare the ground for his revolution in prose went unheeded. In Cody, Kerouac’s command of his adopted language appears magical. It is a novel in which, as Holmes would later write, “the words were no longer words, but had become things. Somehow an open circuit of feeling had been established between his awareness and its object of the moment, and the result was as startling as being trapped in another man’s eyes.”
At the time Holmes read the novel with a kind of angry disbelief. Writing that he sometimes wished Kerouac “would blunt the edge” of his writing so that it might be given the recognition it deserved, Holmes later remembered
going out to walk by the East River, cursing Kerouac in my head for writing so well in a book which, I was firmly convinced, would never be published…. I recall that I cursed him, rather than the publishers, or the critics, or the culture itself that was excluding him. Some years later, I reread Cody with a feeling of amazement at my own confusion that was fully as great as my shame.
Allen Ginsberg also read the novel in the context of its commercial potential. “I don’t see how it will ever be published,” he told Kerouac on June 11. Some of the writing was “the best that is written in America,” but Kerouac’s book was also “crazy in a bad way.” It was “mixed up chronologically”; the surreal sections refused “to make sense” and the “Taperecords are partly hangup” and should be shortened.
Solomon was even more horrified than Ginsberg. On July 30 he sent a blistering letter to Kerouac care of his mother’s Richmond Hill address:
We’ve had a reading of ON THE ROAD and, though we understand it to be merely a “present draft,” we are thoroughly bewildered by almost everything you’ve done since the opening 23-page sample and the prospectus. The subsequent 500 pages are so utterly unlike the novel you